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Parentix: Saving Time, Money & Stress with ControlUp
By Peter Nap4 minutes September 2, 2020
Since Parentix began working with ControlUp, this cloud solution provider for SMEs has gone from having 40 disk space-related incidents to just four and has dramatically simplified the management of their 300+ Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops delivery groups. See how ControlUp is saving Parentix time, work-hours, and stress. Read the full case study.
When one of our customers is so delighted that they ask to tell their story, we couldn’t be prouder. That’s what happened with Parentix—a cloud solution provider for SMEs—contacted us to tell us one thing: they were HAPPY.
Back in 2018, we were in Athens at E2EVC, an EUC community event that draws the best of the best in the end-user computing community, showing off the latest and greatest updates to the ControlUp platform.
Marcel Korbee and Nico Mandersloot, Cloud Ops Engineers for Parentix, had been searching, in earnest, for a tool that would not only help them maintain their systems, but also help them proactively monitor issues that could impact their customers’ user sessions.
A mutual acquaintance pointed Parentix in our direction, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Challenge
The Service Desk, Operations, and Delivery divisions at Parentix maintain about 1400 Windows-operated servers, ranging from Windows 2012 to Windows 2019. They manage several thousand user sessions per day, based on Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops on Windows RDSH.
For Parentix, it’s critically important that they’re able to manage and proactively monitor them. It’s imperative that they’re able to predict whether certain servers could experience an outage and prevent those from happening.
They’d used other applications before that allowed them to do this, but these systems were overly complex, inflexible, and required high-level engineers who could maintain them.
The search for a solution was on.
A Match Made in Athens (which is a lot like Heaven)
When we first met up with Parentix in Athens, more than anything else, they needed a monitoring solution that was simple. They needed something that would reduce the stress on their IT staff, and also help save money and time. ControlUp’s power and ease of use, especially when paired with our automations module, was just the ticket.
Right away, we set about designing their implementation, so they could begin using the platform as quickly as possible.
Our number one goal with Parentix (as it is with all our customers) was to implement a system that was user-friendly, one that would save them time. Their previous solution required them to spend 10 minutes or more to address issues on each of their individual servers; multiply that by 50—or even 100—servers, and that’s more than an entire workday’s worth of time. ControlUp allows them to address the same problems—across their entire breadth of servers—in just a few seconds.
One of the things Parentix were most interested in was our Automations Module, which was brand-new when they were evaluating the platform. This functionality has made it easy for them to compare registry keys, software versions, and more on several servers across multiple domains to find anomalies and and correct them in a snap.
Right from the start, Parentix saw that ControlUp could reduce memory and CPUs with the Sizing Recommendations in ControlUp Insights, which instantly saved them 750 GB of RAM assigned to—but not used by—servers. Seeing results like this has us, in no uncertain terms, chuffed.
Beyond automation, ControlUp keeps Parentix secure. Whereas with their old solution, every user had full rights—keeping the door wide open for mistakes, carelessness, or worse—ControlUp gives them more control over admins’ rights and roles, right from within the console.
Happily Ever After
In sum, the relationship between ControlUp and Parentix has been a happy one. After onboarding ControlUp, Parentix went from having forty disk space-related incidents per week to just four. This has lessened the pressure on their service desk and operations dramatically. Time, man-hours, and stress: these are just three of the things that ControlUp has saved for Parentix; that’s value that you simply can’t put a price on, and we couldn’t be happier or more proud.